What form would that abstraction take now? The Otolith Group in Conversation with Gil Leung (PART 3 of 3)

Gil Leung
Still from The Owl's Legacy, Chris Marker, 1989. Courtesy of The Otolith Group

 

In this interview LUX artists The Otolith Group discuss their Turner Prize exhibition, currently on at Tate Britain, and their new work Hydra Decapita (2010), currently at Manifesta 8, in relation to a diverse research practice combining essayistic montage, discursive space and didactic methodology.

Interview continued from PART 2…

GL: This could be a way of looking at something abstract, in terms of particles or elements, as a constellation rather than determinate form. I think there is so much discourse at the moment on the politics of film and political documentary that utilises things that already have a visibility in terms of general politics and therefore assume some political activity on this basis. The kind of politics of what you have called the poetics of abstraction, would be in opposition to this. So I was wondering how you feel about taking these different elements that are already political and bringing them into relation with each other. How do you see you the political possibility of those relations beyond the actual politics of these specific elements?

KE: When Remnant of a Hydrogen Element talks about the conversion of hydrogen into water or the relation between a red giant and a dwarf star, what we hear is a mode of political physics. The use of science is not at all metaphorical; it is drawn from a fascination with particle physics and astrophysics that functions as a diagram of political forces.

AS: Composers such as Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane and Miles Davis were figures that worked with abstraction in their music and in the ways in which they presented themselves. Drexciya’s abstraction of politics was and is interesting for us. The decision to enquire into the possible forms that political abstraction might take has a lineage in keeping with a series of authors and artists and musicians.

KE: In More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, written in 1998, I argued for an intersection between organised sound and science fiction that was pursued by a postwar Afrofuturist vanguard of electronic musicians that preceded and included Drexciya and that continues into the present in the work of producers such as Flying Lotus. In 1998, the preoccupation was with complicating the question of futurity in relation to the posthuman; today, those questions would be reframed by the requirement to think through the relations between finance, death and abstraction.

AS: Science fiction, in this sense, becomes operative in so far as it relates to the present.

KE: Hydra Decapita can be understood as a science fiction of the present in the sense that was formulated by J G Ballard. Ballard argued that the earth is the alien planet and that science fiction should investigate the next nine minutes rather than the far future. When the far future does appear within our work, it tends to be folded in order to allow for a complex inhabitation of the present.

AS: Looking at Hydra Decapita, the opacity specific to this film is created by the vision of a black ocean that moves between differing levels of light that animate the image.

GL: When you mention this absence of light in terms of a mode of punctuation would you liken it to an imagistic abstraction that moves into something that is readable or perceivable, and then shifts back again?

AS: When we start a new work, we think about the kind of emotional condition that the film wants to inhabit. Otolith I is melancholic on some levels. With Hydra Decapita, the idea was to produce a sense of apprehension. The sea is filmed as a cemetery. When there is land it looks like a hole in the sky. Mostly we aimed for a vision of the ocean that framed it as a block of liquid with no sky and no land. A block of liquid that incarcerates you. The sea is envisioned as a carceral continuum in which the spectator is locked. This is not an abstraction that excludes the spectator; it is more frightening to be welcomed into the work.

KE: It is possible for people to encounter this new work with no prior knowledge of Drexciya, Ruskin, Turner or the case of the Zong. The relations take on an allusive form that create their own correspondences between scenes. The invitation is for people to connect these elements. The film should exceed the hopes we have for it.

AS: People have told us things about Otolith films that helped us to explore those ideas further. There are things happening in one’s work that are not under one’s control; especially when the images operate independently of voice and text.

GL: Like the Duchampian Creative Act, between the ‘unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed’; there is this transformative potentiality. You have to try your best to make something and someone else makes something with that as well.

KE: EPeople respond to a work in ways that exceed the aspirations and the references embedded in the work. We can see the hopes that we have for the work. It is a relief when it becomes other people’s and starts being shared.

AS: There are many aspects to be elaborated in the second part. One aspect is detailed historical research around the Zong trial. Another is to trace the operations of the Liverpool slave-trading consortium into the present. Another aspect is researching the practice of speaking in tongues, of possession and glossolalia. Hydra Decapita ends at a moment in which the protagonist Novaya Zemlya has become possessed by the recordings that she has successfully, and with great effort, learnt to read and to transcribe.

KE: In Hydra Decapita, Zemlya learns to replay the recordings that we are listening to. She has learnt the archaic practices of transcription and subvocalisation that we might think of as reading and writing. William Burroughs suggested that the practice of silent reading happens in the throat. The film ends with scrambled transmissions of the songs of Ruskin’s art criticism that have been played back throughout the film

AS: The ways in which Ruskin writes about Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and During, (Typhoon Coming On) attempts to emulate the operations that Turner deploys by drawing upon energetic forces of fire.

KE: Another entry point for the new film is to envision a glossolalia of the market. What would speaking in tongues of the finance market sound like? To be possessed by the NASDAQ shares index, what would that look or sound like?

GL: It looks like reality.

AS: It looks like the world we already exist in. The question then becomes how to estrange that world, so we fully understand that.

GL: Yes, but then you get Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life question. How do you get that shock of the new? How do you see the world as it is now, rather than as you learnt or are able to see it?

AS: When you hear somebody speaking in tongues, you are continually tempted to ascribe meaning to their speech. You are continually struggling to recognise their speech until finally you are forced admit to yourself that this is a mode of involuntary vocalisation that is language-like, an automatic speech that produces mirage of vocabulary.

KE: This is one of the aspects that we are interested in following up. Once you have a constellation, you can begin to rotate its sides, deemphasising and foregrounding other aspects, bringing certain elements into relief, dropping other elements out.

AS: What is fascinating is to invent ways to different episodes from this ongoing research audible and visible. This is a challenge that is internal to the work. There is a lot that exists as research and development. There is always a work to be made that exceeds the work that is being done.

KE: What if you never get to make another film? Why not populate the work that you are making with the seeds of that unmade work? Over time, these moments begin to call out to each other across the duration of the films. They begin to reinforce each other in unexpected ways. They exceed the aspirations that you have for them. They surprise you in all kinds of lateral ways.

GL: Yes, you work towards this thing you want to make, and it becomes its own thing.

AS: Coincidences happen; the right things fall into place. Sometimes. So you embark on a project and take care to set the conditions that allow things to happen in their own way.

END OF INTERVIEW

Read PART 1.

Read PART 2.

The Otolith Group’s Turner Prize Exhibition is currently on at Tate Britain, London until 3 January 2011. The Otolith Group are also showing as part of the 29th São Paulo Biennial, 25 September – 12 December 2010, ‘There is Always a Cup of Sea to Sail In’, Sao Paolo, Brazil. Also Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain until 9th January 2011 and with forthcoming Tour of Mumbai / Delhi/ Kolkatta in December and solo show at MACBA, Barcelona opening in February 2011.

Gil Leung is a writer and curator based in London. She is Distribution Manager at LUX and editor of VERSUCH journal.

 

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